The Gifted S02E04 Review: Sibling Fight

The Gifted, Season 2, Episode 4: outMatched

Episode four of The Gifted's second season is a bit better in that it's actually trying to make the Mutant Underground's one-track mind of getting Lorna and Andy back from the Inner Circle (I guess we're just ditching the Hellfire Club name?) into a pretty ambiguous affair and not making the conflict one-sided. On one hand, we see very little of Polaris, Andy and the rest of the Inner Circle crowd in this episode, with what little of them that we see showing that they're pretty committed into being these "mutants that strike back" deal. A good chunk of the episode ends up being focused on the Mutant Underground.

Again, it's just such a shame that so much of the screentime is taken up by the Strucker family drama, whereas Blink, Thunderbird and even Eclipse are glorified plot devices at this point. We do have some genuinely good writing in this episode, though I genuinely don't understand what made Caitlin pull off a 180 from going all emo with her "why don't you understand that Andy and I together bring destruction" rhetoric to suddenly as determined as Caitlin to bring Andy back. I guess it has something to do, maybe, with Reed and Caitlin setting a good example or something last episode, but it's so vaguely defined that I'm genuinely not sure.

Still, the Mutant Underground Struckers needed to be on the same page for this episode's plot to happen, and that basically involves Caitlin's increasing zealousness. We discover that the Inner Circle has gotten to Wire, the snarky but ultimately helpful hacker mutant from episode two, and straight-up killed him offscreen. And the Mutant Underground -- mostly Caitlin -- basically force his brother Graph into helping them without even really acknowledging that Graph has lost a brother to this senseless conflict... and keep in mind that Caitlin and Thunderbird basically blackmail Wire into helping them out in the first place, while Caitlin's only concern about Graph is honestly when she needed him to get angry and hack into the hospital.

This gets exemplified in the episode's most powerful scene, which is when Caitlin, a nurse, basically forces Graph to go into painful drug withdrawal just to get him to hack into what the Inner Circle is doing. I understand that Caitlin really, really wants to see his son and is so myopic that she can't accept that Andy has joined the Inner Circle on his own volition, but this is honestly pretty cruel, especially when Caitlin very nearly causes Graph to die when she shot the poor man up with even more drugs to enhance his power. Reed calls Caitlin out on this immediately, and when the entire episode ends up in a fiasco with Lauren getting knocked the fuck out by Andy... yeah, Caitlin better feel guilty.

Just like the whole "Marcos has daddy issues" last episode, though, I think The Gifted is just being a wee bit too silly by randomly shoehorning a flashback to Caitlin apparently being told by a doctor that she can't possibly give birth to Andy, explaining her overprotectiveness. Did... did we really need that? I'm sure most good parents out there would move heaven and earth and let the rest of the world burn to protect their children. I think Caitlin is doing very stupid shit in this episode, but I really never thought that she didn't have a good reason.

In other news, the Inner Circle finally do something quasi-evil, unleashing the population of the mutant hospital (and ignoring the crazy ones that stab each other) while showing up at the news and forcing the hospital's director to apologize to the public. Oh, and they broke out a very specific person out of jail, although we don't see who exactly. Neat stuff. Honestly, while the Inner Circle is certainly evil, killing witnesses and everything, it's not hard to not at least root for them in some fashion or way especially considering how roundabout the Underground has been. Good stuff. The Jace storyline in this episode is... m'eh? He basically burned his bridges with his wife, and gets contacted by a member of the Purifiers. I guess that's where the storyline is going? I'm not sure if we need even more factions, honestly, because we still haven't really used the X-Men dragon lady or the Morlocks yet.

Overall, while Caitlin is still kind of a horrible human being, at least this show acknowledges that and makes it clear that it's by design. Curious to see what happens next for sure.